James Tolkan has died. Best known to modern audiences for a handful of his many film roles in the 1980s—most notably “Slacker!”-shouting Vice Principal Strickland from 1985’s Back To The Future and its two sequels—Tolkan was a veteran performer of both the screen and stage. A long-time favorite of directors like Sidney Lumet and David Mamet, Tolkan’s stage credits included the original Broadway run of Glengarry Glen Ross and multiple roles where he understudied for Robert Duvall, before he eventually made the transition to Hollywood. Per Variety, Tolkan died on Thursday. He was 94.
Raised in Arizona, Tolkan was briefly in the Navy before pursuing a career in the arts, transitioning from an initial interest in music into theater. Traveling to New York (as “a total hick,” in his own words) in the 1950s, he began studying under acting teachers like Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg. Parts soon followed, with the most prominent being Glengarry, where he played opposite Joe Mantegna and J.T. Walsh as Dave Moss, the salesman who initiates the plan to steal the infamous Glengarry leads. (Tolkan would work with Glengarry writer Mamet many times over his career; although largely retired at the time, one of his final roles was as a judge in Mamet’s 2013 HBO movie about Phil Spector.) Although he’d taken a few New York-based TV and film roles in the past, Tolkan had reportedly told himself he wouldn’t go to Los Angeles in serious until Hollywood came calling for him—and when it did, it was with Back To The Future‘s Robert Zemeckis on the other end of the line.
On paper, Vice Principal Strickland really couldn’t be less of a part: He appears in only a handful of scenes of the original film, mostly to deliver some exposition and hassle to Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly. But Tolkan portrays the man with such deliberate, borderline-hateful intensity that the character essentially burns himself into the structure of the film, becoming one of the most memorable roles in a movie that doesn’t exactly lack for them. Forcing himself through Fox’s almost inexhaustible supplies of cool, Tolkan takes on the voice of every authority figure who never believed in the kids under their care, making Strickland a sort of unchanging high school boogeyman. It’s the textbook definition of a talented actor taking a part that’s very little on the page, and transforming it into something indelible—and it helped forge Jim Tolkan’s Hollywood career.
Noting, in interviews, that he’d been playing old since he was a very young man, Tolkan gravitated toward authority figures throughout his career, essentially giving a variation on his Future performance when cast the following year as “Stinger,” the commander who sends Tom Cruise to his dream flight school in 1986’s Top Gun. (Once again, Tolkan is asked to handle large mouthfuls of exposition; once again, his performance leaps off the screen by dint of how convincingly angry he seems to be at the young hotshot in his crosshairs.) With his profile considerably raised by the back-to-back hits, Tolkan worked extensively through the rest of the 1980s and the 1990s, including landing starring roles on short-lived TV shows The Hat Squad and Cobra. (Both created, to considerably less success, by The Rockford Files‘ Stephen J. Cannell.) He landed one of his last regular roles in 2001, when he joined the production of A&E’s short-lived adaptation of the Nero Wolfe mystery stories; Tolkan not only appeared (in a variety of roles) in most episodes of the series’ two-season run, but directed two of its episodes.
James Tolkan was, in other words, the very definition of a great character actor: Someone who could be brought in for a small, possibly under-written part, and elevate it to iconic status by sheer distinctive intensity alone. Appearing in nearly 100 projects across a decades-long career, he rarely had the largest part in a film, but often a lock on the most memorable. His death this week was confirmed by both his family, as well as a memorial statement placed on Bob Gale’s Back To Future web site; the statement notes that Tolkan is survived by his wife of 54 years, Parmalee, and that, as a lifelong animal lover, donations to local animal shelters in his memory would be welcome.